Why should we learn math?
Written by jan Meww, author of jan papers. 

Mathematics is the only subject that deals with most complex ideas in the most precise, concise, and objective manner.

Which of the two following shapes is the larger one?

Was it the pink one? But if you said so, then you are wrong, comrade. We’ll return to this in a moment.The currency of thought is in ideas, much like the currency of the United Kingdom is the Pound Sterling. In other words, your thinking is as rich as the sterling ideas you dabble in and ideas can be represented in several ways. One of these is in prose. Philosophy for instance. Philosophy deals with issues that cannot, by default, be precise and because of this the exposition will not be concise. Let’s see this statement: why is there something rather than nothing? (Nach Leibnitz). Even problems of seemingly elementary nature like the above will need tomes written on them. Philosophy is also subjective, in that, there will always be room for disagreement or a different way of “doing philosophy”.

Let’s look at one more example, from Hegel:

Which I won’t go into in detail but suffice it to say that Hegel claims that the path to the Truth is through the struggle of thesis and anti-thesis, a continuous onward struggle of opposing forces until new truths emerge which will be subject to their own new struggles. In other words, it will be difficult to pinpoint exactly where Hegel is wrong, much like the pink and blue shapes I showed earlier.

The two shapes are of the same size, yet they appear different; in philosophy, wrong ideas might appear right, and right ones might go unnoticed, or mislabeled as wrong, in a similar, but non-visual way.

Ideas can also be rendered visually, but visuals have their own limits (no pun):

Which brings us back to Mathematics. What mathematics can do, therefore, is offer a depth, rigor, objectivity, precision, terseness, subtlety, possibility, and extensibility like no other subject.

Training your brain in mathematics is to actually train your brain to think in terms of some very complex ideas—fast. Employers who are worth their salt know this: they know that a person accustomed in terms of thinking in abstract concepts in an efficient, objective, and effective manner are going to make diamond-level employees. And that’s why they pay them top dollars, too.

But aside from the monetary consideration, we should not forget the psychic income: thinking mathematically will not chain your mind to theorems, lemmas and proofs; it will free it from its previously-imposed, socio-culturally-engineered shackles.

Best,

Jan